Why I Wrote a Personal Operating Guide (And Why Every Leader Should)

Over the years I’ve led teams, built companies, and worked with a lot of very smart people. Yet even in strong organizations, the same problems kept appearing:

• Engineers frustrated with leadership decisions
• Leaders wondering why teams didn’t move faster
• Teams debating solutions without agreeing on the actual problem

Eventually I realized something uncomfortable. People weren’t struggling because they were bad at their jobs. They were struggling because they didn’t understand how their leaders actually think.

Most leaders keep their operating system in their head

Every leader has one. An internal model that governs things like:

• How decisions are made
• When speed matters vs. when caution matters
• Whether mistakes are punished or learned from
• Whether systems thinking is valued over quick fixes

But most of the time, this “operating system” is invisible. Which means teams are left guessing.

Guessing creates friction

If you don’t know how your leader operates, you spend enormous energy trying to interpret signals:

• “Why are we spending so much time on architecture?”
• “Why does he keep pushing back on scaling this?”
• “Why is disagreement encouraged in meetings but silence afterward bothers him?”

Without context, these behaviors feel arbitrary. With context, they become predictable.

So I wrote mine down

I created a Personal Operating Guide that explains how I think and work. It includes things like:

• I think in systems, not projects. Projects end. Systems compound.
• Speed matters, but only after clarity. Moving fast in the wrong direction is expensive.
• Signal before scale. Most companies scale ideas that haven’t actually proven themselves yet.
• Celebrate errors. The fastest learning organizations surface mistakes quickly instead of hiding them.

None of these ideas are revolutionary. But writing them down changes how teams interact.

The surprising result

Once expectations were explicit:

• conversations became shorter
• decisions became faster
• disagreements became healthier

Because people understood the framework behind the decisions. They didn’t need to reverse engineer it.

Leadership is a systems design problem

One thing I’ve learned over time: organizations behave like systems. And unclear leadership expectations introduce friction into that system.

A good operating guide removes that friction. It aligns incentives. It clarifies thinking. And it helps teams operate with far more autonomy.

My recommendation

If you lead people, whether it’s five or five hundred, write your own operating guide. Not a corporate values document. A real one. Explain:

• how you think
• how you make decisions
• what behaviors you reward
• what drives you crazy
• what good work looks like

It doesn’t need to be perfect. But it will save you and your team a tremendous amount of time.

If you’re curious

I published mine here: Personal Operating Guide.

I’d be interested to see more leaders do the same. Organizations run better when the operating system isn’t hidden.